F
fantomena
We will move this to community when it runs its course but we're making some broad changes in the weeks ahead, and communities will 'change' slightly. Obviously this will focus purely on commnunities but the core website look and flow will be the same. It's actually not only a thread about resetera members reflection, but an opportunity to give the community here a chance to do the same.
Everything we've been doing and building here comes from an overarching roadmap/plan to basically adapt what a forum is and how it will be used in the age of social media and tools like discord. We shared some brief details in the general update thread, but the redesign and platform changes are quite fluidly linked so their priority changes.
Most of the changes we've done so far have been unobtrusive in nature (e.g. stream/achievements/likes/giveaways). The major change which was the creation of the 'politics' forum we did put out a public poll. The subforum was just one of a few options and it was the easiest to trial and roll back if it didn't work. When the redesign work is done people will see what we mean by toggles but we can't introduce massive sweeping changes at once. We have to give options and see if the community adapt or just don't use/require that functionality. But we have to do it in a way that doesn't impact or diminish the current user experience.
Believe me, we have a ton of things to get through and at the moment we're frustrated with things moving slowly but robustly. And credit to
EviLore
we've had to reign back because he's had the foresight to see things like the structure change at reset having a massive detrimental impact when it's not properly thought out. It seemed very much a response to what we did here, but without any of the underlying 'plan'. And I don't say that as a criticism, just an observation and a 'lessons learned' for us here too. I also appreciate there are real people behind the software that put hours and their hearts into that project and they probably believed it was a good move. Some of the reaction has been astonishing quite frankly even across social media.
However for NeoGAF, we made a conscious decision at the start of this new opportunity to make community engagement the focus but dovetail it into the existing way the forums are used. Because what has been built the last year has been shaped by you guys, the current community. The biggest change has been the culture shift. Even now, the last few months has seen a very drastic trend of new posts, members and general activity. We're starting to see those roots take hold now.
I think ultimately though, social media is still an issue. These people speak of dogwhistles, completely unaware of their own 'yikes', 'y'all' and other online colloquialisms that are basically subversive flags akin to 'for the cause' tattoos. What was more interesting was the quick fire labelling of alt-right of the mods and members that liked the separation at reset. Sadly, this is still a prevalent smear campaign run against this site and its members which is quite damaging. But we'll continue doing what we're doing. We're fully invested in delivery of this platform, and on a large scale we believe we have a genuinely diverse, emotionally stable and politically balanced core membership. And we realise that there are a decent number of folks that left that have great depths of knowledge, and contribute huge amounts of content and we hope they do return over time. At the moment all we can do is keep building what we have planned out and to some extent we have to realise the benefit of the doubt won't be with us, so we need to show these changes and not just speak about them.
For new members though I believe we see topics not combusting here into the usual one liners and 'tow the line' attitude that takes hold. We do intercede when we feel it absolutely necessary but largely we lurk, read, manage reports, flag things to each other etc. and make sure each voice can be heard, however contrary that may run (subject to the newly drafted ToS (extreme content etc.) - to be published shortly)
